dregs

See dreg.

• IPA^(key): /dɹɛɡz/

• Audio (US):

  (file)

• Rhymes: -ɛɡz

dregs pl (normally plural, singular dreg)

1. The sediment settled at the bottom of a liquid; the lees in a container of unfiltered wine.
   • 1611, The Holy Bible,  (King James Version), London: Robert Barker, , →OCLC, Psalms 75:8:

     For in the hand of the Lord there is a cup, and the wine is red: it is full of mixture, and he powreth out of the same: but the dregges thereof all the wicked of the earth shall wring them out, and drinke them.

   • 1667, John Milton, “Book VII”, in Paradise Lost. , London: [Samuel Simmons], and are to be sold by Peter Parker ; nd by Robert Boulter ; nd Matthias Walker, , →OCLC:

     And vital virtue infused, and vital warmth / Throughout the fluid mass; but downward purged / The black tartareous cold infernal dregs

   • 1826, [Mary Shelley], chapter IX, in The Last Man. , volume III, London: Henry Colburn, , →OCLC:

     Yet even now I had not drunk the bitter potion to the dregs; I was not yet persuaded of my loss; I did not yet feel in every pulsation, in every nerve, in every thought, that I remained alone of my race - that I was The Last Man.

   • c. 1897, Ernest Dowson, Dregs:

     The fire is out, and spent the warmth thereof, / This is the end of every song man sings! / The golden wine is drunk, the dregs remain, / Bitter as wormwood and as salt as pain

2. (figuratively, the dregs) The worst and lowest part of something.

   the dregs of society

   I sat through the dregs of a long hectic evening.

   • 1846 [1845], Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Boston: Anti-Slavery Office:

     If at any one time of my life more than another, I was made to drink the bitterest dregs of slavery, that time was during the first six months of my stay with Mr. Covey.

   • 1900, Edith Wharton, chapter V, in The Touchstone‎, New York, N.Y.: Charles Scribner's Sons:

     […] he said to himself that in the last hour he had sounded the depths of his humiliation and that the lowest dregs of it, the very bottom-slime, was the hateful necessity of having always, as long as the two men lived, to be civil to Barton Flamel.

• The singular form dreg is far less common, but the phrase to the last dreg still has currency.

• debris, deposit, draff, dross, exuviate, feculence, grounds, grouts, lees, loser, orts, outcast, rabble, refuse, residue, residuum, riffraff, rubbish, scum, sediment, settling, trash, trub

• tofu dregs

• regds.